Apr 14th 09 Posted by Fritz McDonald in Featured Articles, Strategic Creative

Don’t Cut Creativity

Right now, everyone is watching their pennies. Given the current economic climate, it’s understandable that colleges and universities would look for ways to trim budgets and control spending. Like their counterparts in corporate America, many are eyeing marketing budgets—and unfortunately, sometimes staffs—and finding them all too dispensable. In the face of serious drops in endowments and funding that impact operating costs, marketing expenditures may seem superfluous. It makes sense to spend less time and money and work toward greater efficiencies in your marketing communications programs—this may be why so many institutions are exploring social media.

The problem is that social media is not a silver bullet—it takes time to build relationships—and by cutting so much, some institutions are reducing or even outright eliminating the most powerful weapon in their marketing arsenal…creativity. Creativity is the best way to make the case for your value…and right now, the value argument is the one you need to make. Everyone from prospective students to potential donors is thinking twice about giving you money. Your job is to show them the value they get for doing so, a value that goes far beyond money, one that will pay lifelong dividends. Ultimately, however, this is not an argument you can make with facts and figures alone. Sure, you’ve got great grads doing great things…and so do all of your competitors. But experience tells us that prospective students and donors make decisions based on information and emotion. There’s only one way to convey emotion and that’s through strong, focused creative marketing.

Now, I’m not talking about cheap stunts or viewbooks that look and sound like Hallmark cards. I mean the kind of creative you remember, the kind that speaks to you personally and opens up a whole new way of seeing things…meaningful creative. The business of higher education requires creative work that goes beyond catchy slogans and edgy graphics. What we need is work that broadcasts our institutional significance in significant ways. And this simply can’t be done without a significant investment in resources. Your staff—now handling twice the workload—may be reaching the breaking point stress-wise. Your campus community and colleagues are probably feeling pummeled by this economy. Your leaders are trying to make do with much, much less. This is an extremely challenging environment in which to develop and maintain a creative vision. Now, however, is not the time to give your brand a pay cut. Any brand equity you sacrifice today, you won’t get back tomorrow.

So how can a commitment to the creative expression of your brand help? Just as your image needs constant nurturing, so do the means by which you make it grow. It’s awfully hard to come up with creative ideas under stress. It’s even harder to connect those ideas to a strategy that will help you make a meaningful connection with your most important audiences. If marketing strategy defines who you are talking to and why, creative strategy defines how. In the end, the ‘how’ is what audiences remember. The Nike swoosh. So the first question to ask is, where is your ‘swoosh’? Have you left room in your budget to enable a bold, creative imagination to come up with an equally powerful—and culture changing—symbol?

Photo by: unprose